


Flexpoints

by qodarkness



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Canon, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-31 03:19:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19417423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qodarkness/pseuds/qodarkness
Summary: The many lives of Theon GreyjoyORTheon Greyjoy dies. And dies. And dies again.





	Flexpoints

Flexpoints 

When Theon Greyjoy is eight years old, his father, urged on by his older sons, starts a rebellion against King Robert Baratheon. It ends with Pyke falling to the Baratheon forces.

Tired of the Iron Islanders and Balon Bloody Greyjoy, King Robert has the whole family put to the sword. Theon’s body is the smallest that dangles from the tall towers of Pyke.

A decade or so later, Robb and Brandon Stark are killed by wildlings in the forest near Winterfell. With Ned and Catelyn away, and Jon left for the wall, Winterfell is easy pickings for Roose Bolton, who gifts the victory to his bastard son, Ramsay Snow.

There are no survivors of the Winterfell Massacre.

***

When he is eight years old, after the Greyjoy Rebellion is put down, Theon Greyjoy is given to Ned Stark to hold hostage against his father’s good behaviour.

Ned Stark is an honourable man they tell Theon. He will treat you well. And Ned Stark treats Theon well. And each time they tell Theon that Ned is an honourable man they do not know that a small pit opens in Theon’s stomach and fills with dread.

Just after Theon’s sixteenth nameday, Balon Greyjoy rebels again, his ships reaving the coastlines of Westeros.

Ned Stark is an honourable man. When he receives his orders from King Robert Baratheon, he does the honourable thing and beheads Theon swiftly before the heart tree in the Godswood. Ned tried to make sure there is no pain and sends Theon’s body, the head decently reattached, back to the Iron Islands.

In response to the death of her little brother, Yara Greyjoy brings a small force of men inland and, using grappling irons and guile, silently makes her way over the walls of Winterfell. There has been enough information in the letters that Theon has sent home to guide her. She slaughters the Stark family in their beds, men, women, girls, down to the smallest boy, and escapes into the night.

King Robert is furious but Tywin Lannister, who has no interest in the petty wars of northern Lords, refuses to bankroll Robert’s new war. Unable to avenge the Starks, King Robert eventually accedes and gifts Winterfell to the Freys.

He ignores the depredations of the Iron Fleet along the coastlines, because they concentrate on the smallholdings that Robert does not care about. The Iron Islands operate, for all intents and purposes, as an independent kingdom, until six years later, when Daenerys Targaryen, in one of her first acts of invasion, burns the Iron Fleet down to the waterline.

***

After the Lannisters started the war against the Starks (and Theon doesn’t care how anyone else describes it, he knows how it started), Theon Greyjoy goes home to the Iron Islands to enlist his father and the Iron Fleet on the sides of the forces of the North. Balon Greyjoy, old and bitter and angry and _beaten_ , refuses to join them.

Theon sails home to the North and rejoins Robb in his fight, renouncing his land and titles in the Iron Islands and pledging himself once again to his chosen King.

He counsels Robb against marrying Talisa Maegyr. Knowing the value of a hostage, he also counsels against the execution of Rickard Karstark but despite having his counsel ignored, still follows his chosen King.

The Freys, knowing Theon’s reputation as archer and fighter and his loyalty to Robb, make sure he is among the first cut down at the Red Wedding. Theon Greyjoy dies upon a Frey sword as he attempts to rush to Robb Stark’s aid.

Three years later, Jon Snow dies at the Wall (again) as the Night King sweeps down from the North, murdering all before him.

***

Ramsay Bolton did not intend for Theon Greyjoy to die when he emasculates him. Ramsay has done this before and is sure he knows just how to make the cuts for Theon to live.

But Maester Wolkan cannot, _cannot_ , stop the bleeding,

Theon Greyjoy dies on the floor of the torture chamber in the Dreadfort and his body is fed to Ramsay’s dogs.

Thirty months later, Sansa Stark dies in childbirth in her (prison) chamber in Winterfell. Some said she willed her own death, others said that being Ramsay Bolton’s son, it probably tore its way out of her with its teeth.

Twenty months later, when the child is a blue-eyed toddler running around the keep, the Night King sweeps down from beyond the Wall. House Bolton is the second to fall after House Umber. Winterfell lies frozen, filled with the dead, as the Night King continues his march south to where a Dragon Queen burns with ambition to rule.

The Night King ends her, her and most of her forces, and then marches back behind the Wall, leaving a country more dead than alive behind him.

The Long Winter lasts beyond the age of any man alive on the day Daenerys Targaryen died.

***

Theon Greyjoy jumps from the walls of Winterfell, Sansa Stark’s hand held firmly in his, knowing he will have to go back.

He gets far enough that, when he hears the hounds again, he can drive Sansa away from him. “Go north,” he says, “only north,” and Sansa flees as he turns back and is taken again.

Brienne searches but is unable to find Sansa in time. Sansa Stark dies in the snow and her body is never found.

When the Night King’s forces take Winterfell, so many months later, they find the little that is left of Theon Greyjoy hanging upon the cross. He smiles in gratitude as they kill him. There is not enough left of him to make a wight and he is finally free from pain and Ramsay Bolton.

The Night King’s forces sweep onwards to the south.

***

Theon Greyjoy dies, his spear turned against him, spitted upon it by the Night King. He buys enough time for Arya Stark to murder the Night King and is mourned and burned upon the great funeral pyre.

After the war ends, Sansa Stark is named Queen in the North. She spends many years in mourning for Theon, but in the end, she marries Beren Tallhart, of House Tallhart. The younger son, he does not have standing to make Sansa take his name and he moves to Winterfell. It is not a love match, but in time, love grows and they are happy.

When she has her first son, the northern Lords assume she will name it Robb, but she remembers the man who saved her (the man she loved), and it is King Theon Stark who rules after her.

***

Queen Sansa and Lord Theon always assumed he would die before her. Years of torture and deprivation had their effect and his near death at the hands of the Night King was another strain on his body. They knew that it was unlikely he would live out his normal span of days but it just made their marriage sweeter; each day a gift.

They didn’t expect that it would end quite as soon as it did, but just after his fiftieth nameday he tells Sansa he is going to the hot springs to ease the scars in his chest and his hands, which were paining him. It isn’t unusual and so she kisses him almost absently and sends him on his way.

When they find his body floating, some short time later, his eyes are closed, his face peaceful. His heart, the Maester told Sansa, had been damaged by everything Ramsay had done to him and it had finally stopped.

He died in the water, as an Ironborn should, and Sansa returns his body to Queen Yara to give to the sea. She keeps only a lock of his hair to inter in the crypts, and another she puts in a locket to wear against her heart for the rest of her days.

Queen Sansa never remarries and her daughter, Queen Thea, adopted late in Sansa’s life, rules after her.

***

Queen Sansa and her husband, Lord Theon rule for many years in Winterfell, their reign (her reign by name but she values his counsel as an equal) one of peace and prosperity and the slow emergence from the Long Winter. But the winters are still harsh in Winterfell and in the end it becomes too much for him. The cold gets into his hands and his feet and his scars and the Maesters say he cannot stay any longer.

In the end, Dowager Queen Sansa hands her Kingdom over to her adoptive daughter, Queen Briony, and she and Lord Theon retire to the warmth in Dorne, to a small estate in the country.

They live quietly there. Theon grows grapes and olives and sails small boats along the coast. Sansa practices her dress-making and embroidery until her eyesight isn’t up to it, and then takes up silk-dying and spinning.

Their hair had long gone white, and their daughter had reigned in peace for over twenty years, when Theon does not wake one morning. Sansa feels the cool of him beside her when she wakes, and she tucks the blankets neatly around her as she lays her head on his silent chest, her arm draped across him.

Their maid and gardener find them like that the next day when they realise no one had seen them since two nights prior. They give them into the care of Queen Asha of the Iron Islands, daughter of Queen Yara. Queen Asha sails down herself to collect their bodies.

Not far from Pyke, Asha lets her uncle’s body slip into the ocean to return to the Drowned God, and sails onwards to anchor off the coast and ride inland to deliver Queen Sansa to Winterfell. Sansa’s body is interred in the crypts there and several months later, the statues are finished and put in place.

Queen Sansa and Lord Theon, made in one piece, hands intertwined, as close in death as they had been in life.

**Author's Note:**

> So I have two chapters of Gifts being written but both need me to finish watching season 2 at least, to make sure I get them right. Getting there, but work has gone mad again so they’ll both take a little bit longer
> 
> Which apparently means that this odd one turned up in my head - all the things that fall out of Theon Greyjoy’s lives and many possible deaths. 
> 
> One of the reasons I love this pairing is how many things (and how much interesting writing) you can build out of them.


End file.
